Despite my being a fan of Twitter, just like Dave and Dave, I am getting fed up with the failing… and the fact that the fail whale is like some cute little “oops” mascot is sort of annoying. But hey, it’s a free service, what do you expect? No much, right?
Along came Plurk which is, well, I dunno… completely ignorable. Oh, and there is FriendFeed which Dave Slusher dumped Twitter for, but that just feels like too much too often to me. Too many updates, and updates from friends of friends? Argh…
Right now Twitter still has an advantage, but I feel like it’s slipping away with every feature that gets disabled, and every whale they serve up. identi.ca is interesting to me because it can be decentralized, and because it’s open source. But is it too late? I don’t think so. I mean, Blogger was the deal years ago, and they kept having their own fail, and nowadays look at WordPress. It ain’t over til it’s over.
I think identi.ca has to do a few things to step up as a Twitter replacement.
- Twitter compatible API – We need clients to make identi.ca as easy as Twitter to use
- Friend importer – We need an easy way to migrate from another service
- Continued development – Right now Laconica is open source, that’s all good, but interested from developers and widespread adoption of a community will be key
I’m now using Ping.fm to post to both Twitter and identi.ca. This is a bit of a pain, but it works. Sort of. I opted not to post from Ping.fm to every damn service I belong to, as I find it annoying to read the same thing from my friends on 6 different networks. (And yeah, some sort of de-dupe filtering sort of thing is needed here.)
Anyway, I have hopes for identi.ca as a replacement for Twitter, or at least as a “private label” Twitter since the source it out there for you to use as you like. Go forth developers, and make something awesome!
(You can follow me on identi.ca, I am raster)